September 8, 2008

Oded Schramm

To our profound sadness and shock, our colleague and friend, Oded Schramm, died in a tragic hiking accident on September 1, 2008.

Oded was a towering figure, an extraordinary mathematician, widely considered to be the most influential probabilist in the world. His revolutionary work transformed our understanding of critical processes in two dimensions through his introduction of the Stochastic Loewner evolution, tying probability theory to complex analysis in a completely novel way. He also made fundamental contributions to circle packings, random spanning trees, percolation, noise sensitivity of Boolean functions, random permutations and metric geometry.

Oded was a remarkable individual: always calm, humble, generous with his insights and ideas, the best collaborator one could hope for and the person who could always be relied upon. Our heart is with Oded’s family. He will be sorely missed by all who knew him.

Due to the outpouring of emotion at the news of Oded’s untimely death, we created the Oded Schramm Memorial Page and this blog is to allow his friends to share their photographs and memories of him, as well as their reactions to the news. (Some of these posts were sent to us in email before we had the blog set up. See also Terry Tao’s blog and Gil Kalai’s blog.)